Featured Articles and Journals: pain

Over the last few years, I’ve been hatching a book, tentatively titled, Don’t Get Better. I will periodically share excerpts such as today's installment (which includes a brief exercise at the end). This is from a chapter called, “Healing...

This last week of the Real Happiness Challenge is about practicing Metta, or Lovingkindness meditation, which means meditating on wishes of goodwill toward a set of people or beings in a variety of categories.

Seven years ago, I developed a mysterious chronic pain in my upper body that had me unable to type, hold a piece of paper, and relegated to the cool wooden floor of my girlfriend’s apartment for hours a day.
I was 26, unable to work, and learning to...

Pain is tough, of course, but the thoughts and feelings of shame which pain can stir up are the real nightmare. In my own history and my private practice teaching adults with pain, feelings of shame are never far behind a chronic pain condition. In...

Living with pain can sometimes feel like half living. A part of you is always tied up with the pain, strategizing how to beat it or bracing against it. Imagine not having to micromanage your pain, or have it be surrounded by stiffness. Imagine being...

I can remember trying to 'feel' the swampy mess of bodily sensations and emotions I felt trapped inside me. What were these squeezings in my chest and throat, this panicked gripping in my abdomen? I knew there was wisdom in the body and that if I...

Recently I was having one of my weekly interviews with my teacher. I was talking about how hard a time I was still having working through the emotions around my recent break-up. It’d been just over two months, and I was feeling as if the hurt...

One evening after my Wednesday night meditation class, Amy, a member of our D.C. meditation community, asked if we might talk for a few minutes about her mother, a woman she often referred to as “a manipulative, narcissistic human.” Amy’s mother had...

I was planning to write a post today about holiday gift-giving and how we're all under so much pressure to buy presents that we forget what it's like to be generous. Except on Saturday I started to feel pain around my right eye. I...

Many years ago when I was pregnant with my son, I decided to have a home birth without drugs, assisted by a midwife. My hope was to be as wakeful and present as possible during the birth, and while I knew the pain would be intense, I trusted...

Listen.
That drill outside the window,
They're fixing the street so it won't collapse under us.
On the subway, a baby howls.
Pull out your earbuds,
Breathe in her high-pitched wails.
The heart of the world is bleeding, and she can't shut the valves...

Like an elastic band the pain in my mouth snaps me back to the dharma, the reality, of my fragile body in this singular moment in space time. All my hopes and fears, all my activism and frivolity, all my sins and virtues are rendered...

Exploitation of yoga in advertising is nothing new. When a product wants to associate with a low-stress or healthy lifestyle, invariably, the commercial features people doing yoga poses. Increasing popularity of yoga makes the marketing...

I've just read an article on LiveScience.com saying a researcher at Columbia University found evidence that strong emotions (in this case, breakups) can cause physical pain, validating what many of us knew intuitively.

Teeth clenched. Hands clenched and pressed tightly to my chest. This is what pain feels like, I think, as the doctor asks if I can feel anything in my foot. Yes, I say. This is a pain that feels like she’s poking me with a meat fork –...